Exhibits

Exhibits

The Noyes Art Gallery is located on both the first and second floor of the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes St. Group tours are available and admission is always free.

"Fragments of Memory"

May 19-June 27, 2013
Noyes Gallery, First Floor
Curated by Alan Leder

Opening Reception
Sunday, May 19 from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Admission is free and open to the public.  Light refreshments will be served.

"Fragments of Memory" explores the work of three Chicago-area artists who employ uniquely dissimilar mediums that intersect at the crossroads of memory. Through their unique perspectives, Kass Copeland, Sarah Rehmer and S. Gayle Stevens address how the past interpenetrates the present. In each case, we are presented with new ways of seeing objects. The exhibition will be on display through June 27.

 "Fragments of Memory" ultimately is about rearranging and transforming the layers of past life into a presence of depth and mystery, when words alone cannot fully inform emotional expression.

S_Gayle_Stevens_web.jpgGayle Stevens has worked in antiquarian photo processes for over 15 years. Using modified Holga and pinhole cameras and camera-less photography, she turns to the history of photography for metaphors and visual inspiration. Stevens favors small, intimate, wet plate collodian and tintypes to tell her stories. Her work projects a mystical, dreamlike quality. She describes her images as “memento mori,” an acknowledgement of lives passed, a rendering of fleeting shadows. Her images often register loss. They are of gone things, psychic mappings that invoke what’s been lost to convey how the interaction between personal and social realms brings memory into the present.

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Kass Copeland creates a surreal world of exquisite box assemblages. On first viewing they bring to mind the seminal art of Joseph Cornell, but, unlike the formalist Cornell, her finely crafted wood boxes vibrate with a sense of intimacy and nostalgia – and a finely honed sense of humor. Assembled among these cleverly devised constructions are an amazing variety of flea market collectibles, hands, frayed texts, coiled springs of past time pieces, and antique commercial poster graphics, all remnants of an earlier age which, together become metaphors. As described by the critic, Jason Messinger, Copeland’s boxes are teeming with “longing, nostalgia, melancholy…all find their voice in her body of work.”

 

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Sarah Rehmer is a painter and mixed media artist who masterfully employs the encaustic wax process to build up the layers of her collages and sculptural reliefs. Like Copeland, her work employs remnants of tattered yellowed text and old family photos, mysterious images that demand the viewer’s personal interpretation. Rehmer describes these pieces as “fragments of memory.” In a series incorporating photography, encaustic, and paint, she has imbued images of anonymous desert shacks (“New Mexico Dreams”) with a similar sense of magical expression and loss as seen in Gayle Stevens’ crumbling, abandoned spaces illuminated by her wet plate process.

Top image: S. Gayle Stevens, "Botany," Wet plate Collodian Ambrotype, 3"x3"

Middle image: Kass Copeland, "The Peace Machine," Mixed Media Assemblage 5"x"8"x2"

 Bottom image: Sarah Rehmer, "Manifesting Stories #1," Encaustic, paper, oil on panel, 12"x12"x5"

"Seed by Seed"

May 19-May 24, 2013
Noyes Gallery, Second Floor

Opening Reception
Sunday, May 19 from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
Admission is free and open to the public.  Light refreshments will be served.

esme.jpg"Seed by Seed," a student art exhibition featuring work by more than 100 students from Districts 65 and 202, is on display through May 24 in the upstairs gallery at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes Street.  Artwork in the exhibit is inspired by a poem by Esmé Raji Codell.